One Gateway API, Three Load Balancers: BGP, L2, and NLB

thomas@tnepeters.com (Thomas Peters) — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem

I run three Kubernetes environments: a bare-metal IPv6 homelab, an on-prem Talos cluster on Proxmox at work, and a production EKS cluster (one repo drives the work pair). Every app in all three exposes itself the same way: an HTTPRoute attached to a Gateway.

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
 name: myapp
spec:
 parentRefs:
 - name: the-gateway
 namespace: gateway
 hostnames:
 - "myapp.example.com"
 rules:
 - backendRefs:
 - name: myapp
 port: 8080

That manifest is genuinely portable. What is not portable is everything below it: how a packet from the internet actually arrives at the gateway. That’s what this post is about. Three environments, three completely different answers, zero changes to the apps.

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One Gateway API, Three Load Balancers: BGP, L2, and NLB

The Problem